Celebrating 10 years of Steam on Linux! Natural Selection 2 developers call it quits, AMD open-sources FSR 2.2, Ludum Dare staff picks, and Team Fortress 2 gets a holiday-sized update in 2023. All this, plus your hate mail.
Special thanks to:
David – Patreon Pledge
Chloecatotter – Twitch resub
Listen:
Subscribe Google Podcasts | Spotify | Apple | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS | More
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:49 Netflix show pitch
02:18 Gamescope on NVIDIA
06:08 Doors as currency
STEAM NEWS
09:44 10 years of Steam on Linux
15:34 Steam in review 2022
19:48 Stealth TF2 blog post edit
NEW GAMES
25:16 ParaSHOTical ARKtiviBeatings
27:08 The Backrooms: Liminal Reality
30:20 Beep’s Escape
GAME UPDATES
32:02 Auto cannons for Dome Keeper
35:02 RIP Natural Selection 2
NEWS
42:26 AMD FSR 2.2 source code
45:57 Dolphin 2023 progress report
52:00 Ludum Dare top 10
55:02 Star Wars MIDI Force
REVIEW
57:44 Aurora’s Journey
HATE MAIL
01:14:09 Elder gaming
Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam: News
- As we all begin to crumble to dust
- We sold out man!
- Speak for yourself, I bought in.
- Feb 14, 2013, it was a Thursday.
- Half Life, Serious Sam, TF2, and a bunch of games from Humble.
- We were 20+ weeks into Linux Game Cast and desperate for content.
- Steam was bragging about having 2,000 games available in the post.
- Times, they have changed.
- I’m glad whoever it is in charge of webzone image graphics at Steam is a fan of Dome Keeper.
- Outside of that Steam was busy during the 2022.
- That little thing called the Steam Deck showed up, language support was expanded, steam next, and plenty of sales.
- The big winnar for me was Next Fest.
- Ayo, might wanna gloss over that mobile app. Woof.
- New Big picture mode still eating poo on nvidia
- The big winner here for me was the steam authenticator app. QR based log in is just so nice
- Surprise, steam usage went up during the pandemic
- Yearly reminder of what the 30% gets you.
- I suppose if the community is taking over, that would certainly explain the change in writing style.
- I’ve seen some people say that if Team Fortress 2 ever got its shit together or if VALVe released a TF3 that the likes of Overwatch wouldn’t stand a chance.
- I don’t think that’s entirely true
- But even in the state of complete disregard that TF2 was left, it was always on the top 20 of most concurrent players on Steam.
- Is holiday considered a standard unit of measurement?
- It looks like TF2 is back on the menu this summer.
- New items, maps, taunts, and war patins.
- “other community contributed fixes”, what could that mean?
Steam: New Games:
- It’s a mash up of Paranautical Activity, Arkshot and Season’s beatings
- Like an FPS super smash bros
- I really wanted to like Paranautical Activity, but for some reason I never did.
- By all metrics I should like it.
- Procedurally generated levels for FPS, no.
The Backrooms: Liminal Reality
- A horror take on the stanley parable
- No monsters, just creepy oppressive atmosphere and non euclidian spaces
- Not everything that comes out of 4chan can be a winner.
- If you have a crippling fear of empty arse rooms that trailer will do it for ya.
- Nice zx spectrum game
- Why does Windows only need 20MB and Linux needs 300?
- That soundtrack is bad.
- Hipster-pixel version of BEEP?
Steam: Game Updates
- Oh shit new dome dropped
- Three new gadgets to hurry back to upgrade
- The autocannon, a second computer controlled gun
- Something to point you in the direction of those mats you desperately need
- And last but not least some point defense
- RIP NS2.
- You never worked well enough that I wanted to actually play you. Which sucks, cuz NS1 was pretty neat
- 10 years is a pretty long time though. Longer than most. It outlived stadia
- The servers are gonna stay up as long as they can afford to run them. Even after that, there is a dedicated server package
- Nice job keeping the dedicated servers around for people to host their own if they want.
- But I would say that if you’d like to support something like NS2 which seems to have a better chance to stick around, you may want to look at Unvanquished.
News:
- FSR 2.1 is already kinda close to DLSS, if you squint.
- If that means more games will have it, great.
- Historically, this has not been the case for a lot of things AMD open-sourced.
- Yeah, FSR1 was huge cuz you could turn it on whether the game liked it or not via gamescope
- This whole needing to implement it thing is too difficult
- Finally fixing some of the game-breaking bugs in Quake GX.
- That’s right, until very recently Quake GX (a homebrew port of Quake Shareware to the Wii) suffered a massive graphical glitch making it unplayable.
- Real fake bump mapping has been restored!
- RIP boot from DVD backups.
- This angered the seven people aware of this particular feature.
- Using the new emulated Portal you can create blank Skylanders, or load real figurine data complete with save progress.
- Oh the mysteries of software development. A new Vblank skip hack just seems to work pretty well. But only for gamecube. And nobody knows why * x files music*
- Back in the wii-u days there was this game called skylanders that required you to buy physical toys to unlock shit in game.
- This was supported via dolpin via using the actual USB reader thing, but now you can just spoof all of the toys natively through dolphin
- Now supports the community made anti-cheat which allows online play in MarioKart Wii.
- As it turns out, Dolphin made it real easy to cheat and spoof the Wii ID when the current one got banned.
- The theme this year was harvest
- Daniel Mullins won this year.
- The Inscryption/Pony island guy.
- Bit of a ringer if you ask me.
- Settlement looks cool but that’s just cuz I like hexagons
- Fallowtide looks interesting
- No more external midi required
- Some steam deck specific fixes and a fancy new linux binary name
- It’s nice to see the 800p res for the Deck.
- The exec is now names theforceengine because tfe was not long enough?
- Yeah, all the old AWE sound fonts and midi stuff is in place now.
- I don’t know why people are hung up on 80/90s PC beep boops.
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Game: Aurora’s Journey and the Pitiful Lackey
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1808570
Devel: the Not so Great team
Engine: Unreal
Price: £12.76 / $14.95 / $19.44
Wazzat: Join Aurora and the Lackey in this side-scroller adventure with Run and gun and platformer mechanics, mini-games and lots of enemies. In 1927, Aurora, a young astronomer, receives the journal of her father who disappeared four years earlier and embarks on a journey to find him.
Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys via Curator Connect
Venn:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Your game does not launch.
- I cleared off 90 minutes on a Friday and here we are.
- That’s 90 minutes more than you bothered to QA the product before putting it up for sale.
- 2023, Steamdeck has moved the Linux needle.
- The few available options work.
- Full and windowed.
- Controller worked and that’s a bonus since the keyboard mapping is a mystery.
- Far as the graphics, nice Gamecube Demo.
Fun?
- 100% my bad on this one everybody.
- I should have double checked that the game actually ran on Linux before Friday.
- Does it make with the fun?
- Yeah, no.
- This is babbies first “that game ™” as a sidescroller instead vs top-down.
- It’s a laser pointer shooty pew pew with floaty arse-jumpping thrown in + the occasional puzzle.
- I’m really stretching the word puzzle here.
- This might have worked as a point-and-click or even some kind of 3D, something.
- Platforming, na.
Jordan:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- I tried to launch it and a wine dialogue button popped up
- Apparently now they’re just shipping the windows binary in the linux depot cuz why not
- Launches fine with proton experimental
- Once you get in the game is another situation entirely. If steam input isn’t on, controller no worky.
- Also the keyboard controls are a little opaque. Navigating the menu took a while until I settled on “f” as the “yes” key and escape as the no key. There are no others
- Graphics here are very basic programmer art and some canned assets
- The soundtrack is just kinda meh
Fun?
- Uh…it kinda sucks?
- You got a little pea shooter, a shield buster and your little robot buddy.
- The robot buddy is the only thing that does any real damage and they’re on dignity cooldown if you use it too much
- There’s also some puzzling you can do with them
- Between all of that are the unskippable exposition cutscenes that never end
- Also, I like being shown a cute little town full of robots doing their shit and and not being able to explore it. It’s all relegated to background elements.
- I think those two issues might be the core of my problem with the presentation
- But I dunno, it doesn’t really click. We’ve been doing a lot of side scrolling adventure shooters/beat em ups and this one really doesn’t stack up
- Like,the core gameplay of scrambling around while you wait for your buddy to feel better might work on paper, but it’s super annoying and unengaging
- Combined with some incredibly lackluster movement, it’s not even all that exciting while you’re trying to kill minions to get parts for your minion to heal up their feel-o-meter
- Also you can’t hit anything that’s remotely off screen
- This feels like a third year computer science project. I’d actually probably grade it as a B from that perspective. But the chairquisition is the university of hard knocks, so it only gets one chair
Pedro:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- It doesn’t launch out of the box
- Quick analysis of the files in the folder indicate no Linux binaries present
- Checking SteamDB and it doesn’t look like there are any Linux binaries there either.
- Tapping the Proton button makes the game work as intended on both the desktop and the deck.
- -1 chair
- On the Deck it seems to not be able to maintain 60 FerPS unless you cut the visual preset down to performance.
- On the desktop it only dipped below 60 when loading things.
- Disabling Vsync and setting the framerate to unlimited made no difference, it’s all 60 all the time.
- Controllers work but you can’t rebind inputs either on it or the keyboard/mouse.
- And wouldn’t you know it, aim is the right analog and shoot is the right trigger on the controller.
- Guess which two inputs my right hand can’t reach at the same time.
- And on the keyboard only WASD is mapped
- -1 chair.
- The Alpakka actually helped, since I could use the gyro to aim and the right trigger to shoot at the same time.
- The graphics are alright and the sound matches what the visuals indicate except for the voice acting or mostly lack thereof
- Spanish voice acting for the protagonist was… surprising.
Fun?
- Yes, I’m pretty sure it would be a very fun game.
- What I’ve been able to play of it, it seems very well done and got more than a few chuckles out of me.
- Slapstick comedy is apparently what they’re going for and in my opinion, they nailed it.
- Unfortunately I can’t enjoy the game because the controls are not rebindable.
- I died a lot getting through areas which shouldn’t at all have been difficult but everything was made harder because I had to play in an uncomfortable position for my arms.
- Right up until I remembered the Alpakka has a really nice Gyro implementation.
- That’s right, you need either Steam Input or the world’s best DIY controller to make your game playable.
- Though, the courier bit with driving the 1930’s pickup that does 120 speed units was fun to drive in because I could use my left hand to WASD it around.
- I want to give this game top score but the lack of Linux binaries, while claiming to be a Linux game, and the inability to rebind controls makes it so I can’t really recommend it regardless of how fun and funny it would otherwise be.
Verdict:
Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:
Hate Mail:
